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Back in the days when Stephen Harper was a little more relaxed about how he dealt with the media, we were panellists together on a noontime radio show.

I can’t remember the news story that put us together as guests, but, at some point, Harper talked about how citizens would be better served if the government was run like a business.

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But government isn’t a business, I protested — you can’t fire Canadians.

There was dead silence at the end of the line. I’d done it — I’d finally had the last word with Harper, who was then a leading MP in the Reform Party and a regular, rather effective, commenter in the news.

As it turned out, however, it hadn’t been my clever argument that had silenced Harper; it was a technical glitch. “I’m sorry. We seem to have lost Mr. Harper on the line,” the host said.

And, of course, I may have had the last word that day back in the mid-1990s, but Harper got the last laugh.

A decade later, he was the prime minister, free to see the government as a business as much as he liked. And what do you know? Thanks to some immigration crackdowns we’ve seen lately, it may now be possible to give Canadians the boot from citizenship.

Savoie’s new book, Whatever Happened to the Music Teacher?, may help restart the discussion about whether we’re right to see government at its best when it’s acting like a business.

Back in the 1990s, the New Brunswick political scientist forced us to recognize how Ottawa was increasingly being run as a quasi-dictatorship out of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s office.

His book, Governing from the Centre, showed us all the ways in which cabinet had become little more than a focus group for the PMO’s ideas.

That’s old news now around Parliament Hill, and Savoie’s new book charts how that centralization has become worse under Harper. Even for those of us familiar with that iron grip, the book makes for bracing reading.

“How does cabinet now operate? It is no longer clear that it has much standing, even as a focus group,” Savoie writes. “The focus has simply shifted away from cabinet and cabinet members to the prime minister’s court.”

Savoie’s more acute concern, though, is how the whole notion of public service has shifted away from duty and toward bottom-line accounting for its actions and spending.

“The essence of the public service is to provide front-line services to Canadians and we have lost sight of that,” he writes. “The public service is tasked with managing the paper burden, feeding the beast and managing processes and we can lay much of that at the doorstep of the auditor-general and other parliamentary officers.”

That’s a large trend that Savoie is trying to buck. So pervasive is business-think around government that press releases are now described as “products.”

I’m repeatedly struck, in fact, by a parallel, reverse trend in the private sector, where there has been a move toward getting corporations to think more of public duty, whether in the realm of good environmental practices or pouring money into arts, culture or worthy public causes.

We look to beer companies or coffee shops to define our Canadian identity, and we ask the government to give us deep-discount sales on our state services. Seems something got turned upside down over these past few decades.

At one point in Savoie’s book, he relates a conversation he had with a government official who had worked in the public and private sector. The big difference between the two, this official said, was the level of monitoring, assessing and second-guessing that’s carried out in government work.

Many would argue that’s a good thing, but Savoie says all this measuring is just a poor substitute for the discipline of the market. It makes government paralyzed and risk-averse. “Management in government is about blame avoidance,” he writes.

Savoie believes it’s time to steer government away from its defensive, measuring mania and back toward a culture that values institutions over individuals. In that type of government culture, he believes, the public service would spend more time looking out for the public than looking over its own shoulder.

In the big picture, that may be wildly optimistic, but it’s worth starting the conversation about whether the government’s only job to make a business case for itself.

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